Mary Pickford at a writing desk. Library of Congress 2008678779.

I’m a beginner and I’m a young writer. I make no pretensions about my skill or where my career is at. I’m still learning. But I’ve heard a good share of the advice, including but certainly not limited to: “Write what you know.”

Like “show, don’t tell,” “write what you know” is not terrible advice, but it has been misused in critique groups probably since about five seconds after someone coined that little axiom. If I wrote only...